A trip to the mountains

We all need to escape the hustle and bustle of everyday life once in a while, to relax and get away from it all. Unfortunately, when we arrived at the car park in front of the mountain railway station where we hoped to flee the world of business for the world of relaxation, we saw that thousands of others had had exactly the same idea. ‘Drive down to the end of the car park, and someone will direct you to a parking space, sir,’ a car park attendant dressed from head to foot in fluorescent colours calls to me through the window.

Once we enter the station building, things start to get hectic: ‘You get the tickets and I’ll see if I can get us something to drink,’ my girlfriend says, and off she goes. And, left standing in the queue in front of the ticket window, I do what I always do in such situations: I study the people around me. In this case, I study the station employees. And as I watch them, a vague thought starts to form at the edge of my mind, but I can’t quite grasp it.

‘Yes?’ says the woman behind the thick glass of the ticket window, bringing me firmly back to earth. ‘Two return tickets,’ I say, and two seconds later, the words ‘38 euros’ appear in red lettering on a display, accompanied by ‘That will be 38 euros, sir,’ from the employee, her voice croaky through the microphone. My tickets and my change are delivered to me through a turntable device below the window.

I am reminded of scenes from various films I have seen where someone uses a telephone to speak to a prisoner separated from them by a thick pane of glass. If the two people are a couple in love, the scene ends with them each pressing a hand against the glass in an attempt to achieve some measure of more intimate contact.

I am very tempted to re-enact such a scene with the woman behind the ticket window, a Ms Haibling, but in view of the long queue of people behind me, all eager to get away from it all, I decide against it.

Suddenly I remember a newspaper article I read, in which a journalist bemoaned the lack of the personal touch in the tourism industry. And how right he was. Customer-orientation begins in the car park or at the ticket office.

‘Tickets, please!’ a voice calls, just as my attention is caught by something else that has always bothered me about the staff on such mountain railways: their stuffy uniforms! Instead of choosing a uniform which would reflect the corporate identity, they always clothe their employees in different shades of blue, according to the motto: blue is always good! It’s not that the uniforms they choose are bad; the question is simply whether a different uniform wouldn’t be more appropriate and therefore better!

And when the ‘Chief Ticket Inspector’ has inspected both us and our tickets with military precision and moved on, my girlfriend whispers in my ear: ‘It wouldn’t hurt him to smile.’ Before I can answer, a voice booms through the loudspeakers: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to one of Europe’s most popular mountain railways. In his day, Mark Twain compared our mountain with…’. They can’t ask Mark Twain for his opinion any more. But they could ask us instead!

Amazingly good!

I particularly remember one mountain railway in Switzerland that clothes its staff in a trendy Swiss ethno look. These local guides were more than happy to provide tourists with information on the region and helped passengers on and off the trains rather than restricting themselves to inspecting tickets. In one cable car in Switzerland, the cable car attendant read aloud the menu for the day from the restaurant on the top of the mountain – in the languages of all the passengers in the car.

In one cable car I once travelled on in Bavaria, the cable car attendants yodelled on the way up the mountain!